The first word I have is bittersweet. The edge of coming and going, or when your body leads you to a place your mind arrives a beat afterwards. An oh you catch up to and never run after. When you feel a thing going before its gone. What you can’t take back. What you leave by mistake.
This time of year is always a turning. We lose an hour of time and so the ends of the day seem to stretch around me, each day begetting more sun. The sky a quilt made up of various shades of the same color. I catalog them in my mind in order to remember that there are multiple ways of watching the world. Not just afternoon into dusk but an azure that turns Turkish blue, sky spun from powder into midnight. Of course I am not the first to notice that there are different blues for different days.
Because I find myself a little heartbroken I return to Maggie Nelson, just to know that I am right in my approximation of sadness, that the blue is all an illusion anyway, all color a matter of perception, as unreliable as memory.
Is it that beauty is always going to hurt, even just a little bit? Because of its approximation to the truth? How the sun can be maddening, thrilling, even horrible because of how much it reveals? I think of the days I spent camping on the island of Crete, how the sand was so hot it almost burned and I would have to jump back into the ocean again in order to obtain some sense of internal equilibrium. Everything was too clear, too pristine, blindingly perfect. Have you ever had a moment like this one: a body next to you but already gone, faced towards you but turned away, open but already disappearing? And how do you explain the uncrossable distance between another body and yours anyway? Why are there no better words for it?
Or else blue as a kind of stillness. When there’s a power outage and the lights on my entire block are out, it’s somehow the only time I notice the power lines above me and the perfect crossing of two blues, the sky refracting off the walls of my apartment.
What else is there to say? I try to imagine writing these letters to you and I’m not sure how to measure my life into words anymore. Where is there room for precision? Sometimes I think I hate LA but then the light will appear so sharply as to make everything look glorious again. I only feel like myself when I write, so what does it mean as I struggle? What I really want to know is do you ask yourself these questions, too: how do you build a model of a world you want to see, and where do I fit in?
I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. I buy a collection of poems based on this line alone. Who knew that loneliness could exist as a certain kind of quiet? A pitch so subtle in its volume. More like a hum resting atop everything else, hidden under the breath until spilled over into speech. In the poem the narrator describes quiet as an act of defiance. Her act of choosing to be so enacts a purposeful absence that settles over everything around her. The phone rings without an answer. The view from outside looking in reveals nothing.
But what is quiet? Is it refusing to let language take over? One can only articulate so much before meaning gets lost through sound. Or until it feels like I’m miming my way towards clarity, when most of the time there is no clarity but instead greater confusion. How many times did I turn over what it felt like to be around a particular person by parsing through their language? How many times did I retrace their actions, like they had a direct correlation to a certain phrase left unspoken but that would miraculously reveal a certain feeling? Sometimes there is no sound. No syllable. No phrase uttered. Only some impression or tug in the gut that blindly leads. To what I don’t know. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that comes back. One evening I run aimlessly because I’m carrying so much fear and I run until I can’t breathe and I stop and it picks back up again and so I have to run some more. And when I’m finished I’m not blissed out or necessarily calmer but I decide to resign myself to whatever it is that’s unfolding within me, and I think about that as I watch a jazz performance later that night and feel a warmth emitting from the bass and drums towards all of us, and then when he says I think you are a beautiful person and I wonder why that’s such a terrifying thing to hear.
Always a fantastic read. Thank you 🩵